Testing The First PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD On Linux Has Been Disappointing

While the sequential read/write performance was meeting expectations, the rest of the time the results were lackluster and only competitive to existing Gen4 NVMe SSDs. Of course, one of the immediate thoughts that comes to mind was whether even with the active heatsink was whether the TD510 was running into any thermal issues... That didn't appear to be the case.

As some follow-up tests I ran a set of synthetic and real-world Linux I/O benchmarks consecutively for the span of more than ten hours. Here's the reported NVMe TD510 temperature over that time:

The drive operating with PCIe Gen 5.0 connectivity was running cooler than expected but again does have a large heatsink with fan. But long story short I never saw the drive hit above 60 degrees during the testing the past few days.

So right now I'm left rather unimpressed by the Inland TD510 at least under Linux. We'll see in the days ahead if there are any near-term firmware updates (sadly no Inland FWUPD/LVFS support...), how the Windows reviews pan out, and any comment from Inland. It's possible there could be some Linux oddity at play although that seems rather unlikely considering how well optimized the Linux I/O stack has become and battle-tested on many high performance Linux storage servers. Even the IO_uring random read/write performance with FIO was low along with all the database workloads tested. From what I've heard from other reviewers, I am not alone in problems with this early Gen 5.0 drive.

In any event stay tuned and I'll be back around with more Linux benchmarks as any improvements materialize. But for the time being at least it doesn't make sense spending $349~399 on this 2TB PCIe Gen 5.0 drive when for most workloads it's only competing with Gen 4.0 drives that cost half the price or even less.